One Sunday morning a few years ago, I was appalled to find myself the subject of a shock horror front page tabloid newspaper expose. Apparently I had taken drugs with the-then British prime minister.

The story itself didn’t come as much of a surprise: it did, after all, feature in the soon-to-be-published biography of David Cameron by my friend Isabel Oakeshott - a harmless enough anecdote about how, while we were Oxford undergraduates, Dave and I had occasionally smoked weed while listening to Supertramp’s Crime of the Century.

No, the bit that really bothered me - shocked me to the core, in fact - was that one of Britain’s biggest-selling Sunday newspapers considered such an utterly inconsequential piece of trivia to be the single most important story in the world that day.

Just think, for a moment, of all the scandals the newspaper could have splashed over its front page if it were really doing the public service job it pretends to do.

It could have named some of the numerous politicians, Cabinet members included, who are involved in paedophile sex rings.

It could have revealed that for many years our skies have been sprayed with toxic chemicals which poison our fields, livestock and water supplies.

It could have finally blown the whistle on 9/11, the fake moon landings, the dinosaur hoax, the climate change scam, the evolution lie or the fact that all wars in living memory - and probably all wars ever - were not ‘natural’ or organic events but part of the cynical disaster capitalism/blood sacrifice business model of the ruthless predatory elite which really runs the world.

Instead, though, the

Mail on Sunday had decided on behalf of its millions of readers that the story which should most occupy their thoughts over breakfast that day was the revelation that a 19-year old boy at university in the 1980s had smoked a jazz woodbine while listening to a classic album by a slightly uncool pomp rock ensemble.

What this episode should have taught me - though it didn’t properly because I was still fairly asleep at the time - is that ‘news’ is an entirely artificial construct. That is, ‘news’ is whatever the lying, propagandistic media has decided, in the interests of its dark overlords, it feels most needs to be shoved in our faces at any given time. Rarely, if ever, is it there to inform us. It is there to distract us, frighten us, and deceive us.

Whenever any story is given prominence in the media, your default response should be to count your fingers: you just know you are being sold a pup.

It’s in this context we should view the latest political drugs scandal to hit the headlines. Apparently - if you believe the lie - the French president Macron, the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the German chancellor Friedrich Merz have been caught, almost red handed, about to share some cheeky lines of coke in a train carriage en route to Kiev in the Ukraine.

I knew the story wasn’t true as soon as it appeared in all the papers. In fact I knew it wasn’t true before that because it got far too much circulation on social media beforehand.

By ‘the story wasn’t true’, I’m certainly not suggesting that Macron, Starmer and Merz don’t do cocaine on a fairly regular basis. That would be absurd. It would be almost as ludicrous as suggesting that Volodymyr Zelenskyyyyyy, the penile-piano-playing, gakhead comedian that they were on their way to see, is not so heavily into the marching powder he makes Al Pacino in Scarface look like Mary Poppins.

Of course it’s more than likely that Macron, Starmer, Merz, Zelenskyyy and most of the other world leaders - though not Trump, because he’s a known straight edge, which is a form of perversion in itself - take coke because they are disgusting, degenerate, low-grade individuals who crave any altered state that might give them the rare opportunity of escaping the horror of being themselves.

But on this particular occasion they dur obviously weren’t taking coke or about to take coke because if they had been the story would have been suppressed by the media rather than bigged up by it.

So why has this story materialised at this particular time? We can only speculate but I suspect that it probably was designed to serve a number of functions simultaneously.

One, certainly, would be distraction. There’ll be a big story, several big stories affecting us all probably, which they’ll be trying to bury.

Another is the artificial generation of hinterland. These men are nothings, nobodies, the soiled wank rags of their Cabal controllers. In order to make us interested in them, the media has to concoct stories that make them look like real people with mild, forgivable-ish vices, rather than the soulless puppets they actually are.

Another is to sow disinformation. Some people, most people, will be genuinely shocked at the idea that world leaders might flagrantly be engaging in the kind of drugular activities that would land the rest of us a fine or a suspended prison sentence. These innocents will be reassured - now that the story has been officially revealed as a hoax by their trusted mainstream media sources - that of course our world leadersdon’t take cocaine. It’s a bit like the way They quelled rumours of high level paedophilia a few years back. They so arranged it that the paedophile victim who appeared in the highest profile court case was publicly exposed as a fantasist and a liar - thus giving the world the impression that all the other paedophile victims out there were liars and fantasists too.

Another is so They can blame the Russians (again) - and sow more seeds for this new World War They’re so keen to bring off.

Really, don’t you just hate the media?

None of this stuff is a fair representation of the truth, though, as you can easily find out for yourself if you read his most famous book The Prince. It’s not a long read - only 154 pages in the Penguin Classics edition. But hardly anyone makes the effort, not even supposedly ‘educated’ people like me, because they sorta, kinda think they know what it says already. “End justifies the means,” right?

No. Machiavelli never said that - though I really wanted him to have done when I first skip-read his book while I was at school. We were studying Shakespeare at the time and were learning about a stock character type in Elizabethan drama called the ‘machiavel.’ The machiavel is emblematic of slippery deviousness, cunning and wicked unscrupulousness. Iago, for example, the horrid schemer who persuades poor old Othello that his innocent wife Desdemona is having an affair.

So I got hold of a copy of The Prince - probably even bought a copy and put it on my parents’ bill, as one could do in those days - and spent all of half an hour trying to find examples of Machiavelli saying evil stuff, which I could then quote knowledgeably to impress my teacher and get an A. But I couldn’t because, as I quickly gathered even from this very cursory acquaintance, the book is much more measured, more sympathetic even, than it is in popular repute.

That’s because poor Machiavelli was the victim of a Europe-wide hit job. By the time anyone outside Italy had read The Prince - it wasn’t translated into English til 1640 - Machiavelli’s name had long since become a byword for evil. England’s last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury Cardinal Pole, who resented his anti-clericism and his rudery towards the Pope, set the ball rolling by declaring him an ‘Enemy of the human race’. Machiavelli’s Christian name - Niccolo - was said to have given the devil his nickname, “Old Nick”. Elizabethan dramatists blamed him as the inspiration for all the scheming and murder that took place in Renaissance Italy. They hated him in France, too, where he was blamed for inspiring the behaviour of Catherine de Medici.

But what had Machiavelli actually done to deserve all this? Not a lot, as it happens. Nicolo Machiavelli was just a jobbing diplomat in Renaissance Florence who had fallen out of favour and so used his spare time to compile a treatise on sound governance that he thought might get him back in with the Medicis. But it wasn’t simply an exercise in sucking up to the elites; it was also an attempt to restore national pride. He had grown up in the golden age of Lorenzo de’ Medici, when Florence had been a first rate city state. Since then, though, it had collapsed into civil war and factionalism, including a disastrous stint under French rule by the invading army of King Charles V. The Prince was, in part, Machiavelli’s vain attempt to help restore the glory days.

He did so not by advising rulers to be more evil, but by taking a pragmatic view of history and trying to work out which methods of governance had proved most conducive to stability and peace. Many of his reference points will be unfamiliar to modern readers. Agathocles the Sicilian, for example.

Agathocles was a potter’s son who, in the 3rd century BC, set his cap on becoming ruler of Sicily. He did so by staging an early version of the Red Wedding scene in Game Of Thrones. Having risen through the ranks of the militia (admittedly through reckless courage), he became praetor of Syracuse, where one morning he assembled the people and Senate, supposedly to discuss important business. Machiavelli tells us: “…at a prearranged signal he had all the senators, along with the richest citizens, killed by his soldiers; and when they were dead he seized and held the government of that city, without encountering any other internal opposition.”

If Machiavelli were the devil incarnate he is reputed to be, this would have been one of his choice examples of how to rule. But it’s not. On the contrary, Machiavelli deplores the episode, explaining: “It cannot be called prowess to kill fellow citizens, to betray friends, to be treacherous, pitiless, irreligious. These ways can win a prince power but not glory.”

Not, let us hasten to add, that Machiavelli is averse to displays of brutality or even cruelty pour encourager les autres. But his occasional justification of what we might consider ‘bad’ behaviour needs to be understood in its proper context. Machiavelli’s starting position - not unreasonable given the chaos, lawlessness and bloodshed of the time - is that men are ‘ungrateful, fickle, liars and deceivers, they shun danger and are greedy for profit.’ Of course, they are capable of virtue too: ‘They would shed their blood for you, risk their property, their lives and their children, so long, as I said above, danger is remote.’ But this virtuous behaviour only tends to last while times are good: ‘When they are danger they turn against you.’

Machiavelli isn’t trying to write a new chapter of the Bible. He is writing an instruction manual for rulers during a particularly violent and unstable period of history. It’s a work of pragmatism, not moral idealism. But still that doesn’t make Machiavelli a bad man, as consider the nuance in his infamous statement that ‘it is better to be feared than loved if you cannot be both’. Note first, Machiavelli’s implicit assumption that it really would be a nice thing, if possible, for a ruler to try to be loved too. And note secondly, the lengthy explanation that follows and which, I think, softens much of the supposed ruthlessness of Machiavelli’s philosophy. ‘Men worry less about doing an injury to one who makes himself loved than to one who makes himself feared,” he says. [True, surely?] ‘The bond of love is one which men, wretched creatures that they are, break when it is their advantage to do so; but fear is strengthened by a dread of punishment which is always effective.’ [True also, surely? And I do like that touch of sad regret in ‘wretched creatures that they are’. It’s hardly Machiavelli’s fault, is it, if we are all fallen?].

But enough Renaissance history and literary criticism. I want to conclude by extrapolating a more general truth about the nature of our understanding of the world. And about how the dark rulers who currently lord it over us - the modern equivalent of the Medicis, the Pope, Charles V and the various Italian city states, I suppose - get away so easily with doing to us what they do.

One of the things we Awake types are often lamenting is the way in which the tiniest, smallest sliver of a fraction of the world’s population - the Cabal; the Predator Class; The Powers That Be; the Satanic Bloodlines; call them what you will - has yet been able to treat us like cattle, or worse than cattle, for generation upon generation. And while obviously, I’m not letting the Cabal off the hook - they really are evil - I do think there’s a degree to which we have invited our own destruction by being so complacent and lazy.

I’m blaming myself as much as anyone. Especially the person I was before I woke up. There I was, blessed with one of the best educations the world supposedly offers, and yet still, mostly, I remained mired in ignorance because I took too easily for granted what I had been told by my imagined superiors - parents, teachers, the government, ‘experts’, whoever.

The Machiavelli thing is just one tiny example of this. Here, briefly, I have with luck demonstrated that everything 99.99 per cent of the people who’ve heard of Machiavelli know about one of the bigger names in history, or political philosophy anyway, is a caricature of a travesty of complete nonsense. It’s at best a crass simplification; at worst - probably for the usual reasons of propaganda and political intrigue - a cynical misrepresentation.

And it happened because, as usual, none of us did our homework. We regurgitated what teacher wanted to hear - Machiavelli bad, m’kay - and the reason teacher wanted to hear it was because he or she hadn’t bothered to do the homework either. Rather than read the actual book, we all went with the received idea of people who hadn’t read the book and took it on trust that the generally accepted narrative was the correct one.

You can apply this rule to: dinosaurs; safe and effective; viruses; the Trump assassination attempt; the Titanic; space; World War II; climate change; 9/11; cholesterol; the shape of the world; pandas; fractional world banking; the sex of presidential wives; Western liberal democracy…

In fact you can probably apply it to just about everything.

You know how before you’ve been away somewhere you really haven’t a clue about your destination, so you ask round for advice, some of which turns out to be useless and some of it brilliant? And how, once you’ve got back, even though you knew almost less than nothing a week ago, you’re suddenly Mr Expert?

Well that’s me, now, after a weekend in Florence. Suddenly I’m Mr Florence Expert.

Obviously I’m not really, but if you’re going to Florence, or you’re thinking of going to Florence, or if you’ve been to Florence, or you just like reading my stuff because it’s always entertaining then this piece will be right up your Via, probably.

Don’t Order The Bistecca

One of the main gastronomic specialities of Florence is a huge chunk of steak on the bone called Bistecca alla Fiorentina. They cook it perfectly - charred on the outside, very pink in the middle - and, quite rightly in my view, won’t serve it to you any other way. Before they cook it for you they parade the chunk of meat before you at your table and you go - “Ooh yes! I’ll have some of that!”

But this decision is a mistake. Your hunk of meat is going to set you back a minimum of 50 Euros (because they won’t cook less than a kilo), which though not expensive given the quantity of juicy flesh involved, is still a waste of your valuable Italian eating money. Let me explain why: 50 Euros is comfortably the equivalent of two really good main courses (‘Secondi piatti’), say an ossobucco or a fish dish. How many days have you got of eating Italian regional food? Not many, probably. Do you really want to use up one of your meals eating what, essentially, for all its magnificence in appearance, is just a big chunk of steak, which tastes the same each mouthful. And which you won’t finish.

You will, of course, ignore my advice. And probably rightly because Bistecca all Fiorentinais a dish you’ll want to try at least once. But the first will also be your last because afterwards you’ll have learned your lesson.

Alla Vecchia Bettola

This is possibly one of the best, most authentic and relatively untouristy restaurants in Florence. You will find it impossible to book a table because they usually won’t answer the phone. But you do have to book to get in so my advice is turn up in the morning and reserve in person. It’s worth it.

Why is it so good? Well, being just outside the city walls it’s away from the main drag. Its attitude, not unfriendly, just honest, is: “If you can’t be bothered to make the effort we don’t want you in here.” By the time it opens for dinner at 7.30pm, a big queue will have built up outside (all people who’ve booked). Then everyone surges in and grabs a place on one of the long tables. You’re dining with strangers and it’s pot luck who you get.

We were lucky. “Are you James Delingpole? I came to your house twenty-five years ago!” said a nice woman in the party of three next to us. Her name is Chrissie Manby and she’s now a very successful novelist, author of more than 40 books (including this romance set in Florence), but when she came round to our house, she was just an impoverished student and aspirant writer, who’d turned up randomly because she was a friend of a friend of mine. Apparently we were welcoming to her - which was a relief to hear - and she’d never forgotten us. The couple on the other side of the table from Perth, Australia were also nice. Obviously I talked to them about the shark danger while swimming off Cottesloe and City beaches. James, the Aussie, thought it wasn’t worth the risk, whereas I, the other James thought it was a game of percentages worth playing.

I recommend the Penne alla bettola (which I think have vodka and a bit of spice in them). But it’s all good.

Cocktails

Apparently the loggia roof bar in the Hotel Palazzo Guadigni overlooking Santo Spirito square is great for cocktails. But we couldn’t get in because we hadn’t booked. [Booking seems essential for pretty much everything in Florence, even in off-season, if you want to get in]. This did at least spare us the horror, though, of the busker in the piazza below playing pop ‘classics’ on his saxophone. First Eye of the Tiger; then, just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, Imagine.

But I doubt for cocktails you’re likely to beat the ones in Serre Torrigiani, up by the Porta Romana. It’s in a corner of the biggest private garden in Europe, which belongs to a marquese whose family have had it since at least the Renaissance. We couldn’t get to see the garden - probably because we hadn’t booked. But you can see from the aerial shots on their website that it’s pretty incredible, even though you’re only allowed to visit a fraction of it.

I recommend the cocktail with cucumber flavouring. Or the basilica. They do food too. Apparently it gets rammed with cocktail-drinkers in summer, 500 at a time.

Giardino Dell’Iris

Too late. You’ve probably already missed it. It’s only open from 25 April to 20 May, or thereabouts, because that’s the iris season. The red iris on a white ground (not a lily, as incorrectly believed) is Florence’s emblem. I love irises. They are one of my favourite flowers, as how could they not be anyone’s? Supposedly - though I can’t quite believe this - you can see up to 1500 varieties of iris in all shades from purple to burnt sienna to salmon pink to yellow and deep blue.

The garden is just below the tourist hell spot of the Piazzale Michelangelo, full of stalls selling tat to the captive audience lured there by the panoramic view of the city. Unless you know it’s there you could easily miss it. Unusually for Florence, it has free entrance.

The Uffizi

Because the queues are so terrifyingly long, you may be tempted to give it a miss. This would be a mistake. For my money this is the best art collection in the world and if you want to see masterpieces like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus - which you do, because unlike say the Mona Lisa it really doesn’t disappoint in the flesh - then you’ve no option but to put yourself through this gruelling but rewarding ordeal-by-art.

Reserve your ticket way in advance of your visit. Be prepared to be thoroughly knackered and paintinged-out by the time you get to the Caravaggio Medusa and his even-better Bacchus. I think my favourite is probably the Lucas Cranach Adam and Eve has just taken her first bite of the apple and her coyly inviting half smile is so seductive that it’s no wonder that Adam, who has never seen anything like this before, is scratching his head and looking somewhat bemused.

All’Antico Vinaio

Shiacciata is a Tuscan flatbread, a bit likefocaccia only thinner and crispier on the outside. It’s olive-oily and melts in the mouth. One of the best places to get it is just outside the Uffizi exit - a good way to recover from your ordeal-by-painting. If you get the timing wrong, you’ll have to queue for about an hour. So, my advice is to go for the 8.15am slot at the Uffizi, which means you’ll be out well before the lunchtime crush. I only queued for about 5 minutes.

I can recommend the Pistachio 4 (Parma prosciutto crudo PDO 18 months, fior di latte mozzarella, pistachio cream, and pistachio granules). Yeah. It sounds weird. But if you don’t try a pistachio sandwich at least once in your life you’re going to kick yourself when you get home. Also, it’s delicious.

Brancacci Chapel

When I first visited Florence in my youth, the Brancacci Chapel was closed for restoration. It was also closed for restoration the next time I went. So, third time lucky.


You go to see the frescoes by Masolino, Masaccio and - turning up sixty years later to finish the job - Filippino Lippi. Felice Brancacci, the chapel’s patron, was a wealthy cloth dealer. In one of the scenes (by Masolino), his wares are advertised in the splendidly rich garments worn by a pair of snooty nobles utterly indifferent to the miracle being conducted behind them by St Peter (Tabitha being raised from the dead). Overtly, the message is: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Covertly, it’s saying: “Come to Brancacci’s high class outfitters for all your embroidered silk requirements.”

Boboli Gardens

I make no apologies for the fact that most of my recommendations are south of the river, in the area known as Oltrarno (ie ‘the other side of the river Arno’). That’s because, just like with Rome and Venice which suffer from the same problem, you need a haven to which you can retreat from all the heavy sight seeing. Oltrarno is your friend.

The gardens are behind the Pitti Palace and you could spend at least half a day just chilling there and making the most of your 10 Euro entry fee. There are lots of high hedges and avenues offering shade. And if you need things to look at there are sculptures everywhere - some Roman, some more recent, such as the one from 1560 depicting Cosimo Medici’s favourite dwarf (I wonder how his other dwarves felt about this): it has been open to the public since 1766; before that it was the Medicis’ private playground - and grottoes.

If, like me, you are down the rabbit hole then you may find the grottoes particularly interesting. They are chock-full of owls and goats, including the leering head of a horned goat looking suspiciously like you-know-who. I appreciate that the Medici family spent a lot on church interiors and religious paintings. But I don’t think that’s where their real religious sympathies lay, do you?

Churches, cathedrals, cloisters, duomos, etc

You’ll find a lot of these in Florence, more than you can shake a stick at. And they contain all manner of treasures, such as the exquisite crucifix Michelangelo sculpted when he was just eighteen and Francis of Assisi’s very rough woven black robe, plus all manner of spectacular frescoes, like the ones in the Spanish Chapel at Santa Maria Novella. Not to mention some fine architecture which you will especially like if you are in to Brunelleschi.

Here’s the thing, though: if you miss some of it, or even most of it, it won’t kill you. Even though I’m writing this but a few days after my visit, already all the church interiors and paintings and frescoes have merged in my head into one messy high cultural sludge. I fear this is the normal experience for most of us. Within a year you’ll be able to remember barely a single detail about your trip. And the details you will remember probably won’t have much to do with art and churches, but with people and incidents and food.

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